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Time-of-flight measurements are often used for the measurement of some distance, e.g. with a laser range finder, used e.g. in an airplane, possibly in the form of a scanning laser radar.
Here, an apparatus sends out a short optical pulse and measures the time until a reflected portion of the pulse is monitored.
The distance is then calculated using the velocity of light.
Due to this high velocity, the temporal accuracy must be very high – e.g. 1 ns for a spatial accuracy of 15 cm.

The time-of-flight method is typically used for large distances such as hundreds of meters or many kilometers.
Using advanced techniques (involving high-quality telescopes, highly sensitive photodetection, etc.), it is possible to measure e.g. the distance between the Earth and the Moon with an accuracy of a few centimeters, or to obtain a precise profile of a dam.
Typical accuracies of simple devices for short distances are a few millimeters or centimeters.

As time-of-flight measurements are preferentially used for large distances, the beam quality of the laser source is crucial.
In addition, a telescope can be used to obtain a large beam diameter and an accordingly increased Rayleigh length, i.e. a small beam divergence.
The target can be equipped with a retroreflector in order to increase the amount of reflected light.
The pulse duration used is usually between 100 ps and a few tens of nanoseconds, as achieved with a Q-switched laser.
For large distances, high pulse energies are required.
This can raise laser safety issues, particularly if the laser wavelength is not in the eye-safe region.
For nanojoule to microjoule pulse energies (as required for moderate distances), it is possible to use a passively Q-switched microchip Er:Yb:glass laser, which can generate fairly short pulses (duration of the order of 1 ns) with pulse energies around 10 μJ in the eye-safe spectral region.

Arbitrary Index Profiles

A fiber's index profile may be more complicated than just a circle:

Here, we "printed" some letters, translated this into an index profile and initial optical field, propagated the light over some distance and plotted the output field – all automated with a little script code.